Growing number of young Londoners on the street

A startling number of London’s young people are living on the street or close to it, workers at several city agencies are reporting.

They’re coming for help with more complicated problems — from mental illness to gang membership — and a growing loss of hope.

But the most common, and increasing request is basic: something to eat.

Signs of a potential crisis include:

One downtown agency is reporting a 62% increase in visits from youths seeking meals and other essentials.

Another agency reports seeing young people with far more complex and chronic problems than even a few years ago, and double the number of outreach workers wouldn’t satisfy the demand for help.

A third agency also is reporting an increased demand for food, and an increased plea from schools seeking help with troubled students and violence.

As hard as agencies are working and as resilient as 16- to 25-year-olds are, many youths are beginning to wonder if there is any future.

“They feel like failures. They start to lose hope and a vision of where they might be and where they might succeed,” Greg Nash, leader of the youth and family program at Intercommunity Health Centre, said.

His six youth outreach workers can barely keep up with the yearly demand from about 3,000 people aged 12 to 25 experiencing not only limited job and school opportunities, but a breakdown in family and social supports, depression, self harm, drug abuse and other medical problems.

“I could have six more workers and their work would be full-time.”

Six years ago, when the youth program began, outreach workers focused on providing recreation programs and employment help. Now it’s getting youths help with addictions, physical illnesses, depression and other mental illnesses.

“It’s a real shift from health promotion to health intervention,” Nash said. “Growing up is a lot tougher today than it has been in the past couple of decades.”

The solution for many is to turn to drugs, said Henry Eastabrook, a street outreach worker with the Intercommunity Health Centre.

“For young people who have no money, no job and a fractured family, there’s a sense of displacement and despair. A quick remedy to that is some kind of narcotic.

A veteran outreach worker, Eastabrook said he’s seeing more young people on the street than he has in the past, and there are statistics backing up that impression.

The number of visits by youth looking for food and other daily basic needs at its drop-in centre on Richmond St. increased 62% from about 12,000 in 2011 to about 19,000 in 2012, according to the just released annual report from Youth Opportunities Unlimited.

“We’re seeing an significant increase in demand for basic services. It speaks to the level of need in our community,” executive director Steve Cordes said.

“It’s taking longer for young people to find jobs.”

A lot of the youths come to use laundry services, to get basic hygiene supplies or help with housing, but the most common need is the most basic: food, said Devon Trowell, the on-site supervisor at the drop-in centre and the other operations at the Cornerstone building on York St.

“We’ve definitely been busier” she said. “Youths need to eat.”

The same thing’s happening at St. Leonard’s Community Services in London that offers a range of programming for youth with justice issues, including a program teaching them how to manage food and cook.

“People are asking for more food and to take food home with them,” executive director Heather Callender said.

St Leonard’s also is serving more youths, with more complex barriers to help, including the growing influence of street gangs, she said.

The pressures on youth are showing up in schools, with St. Leonard’s called on more often to deal with specific conflicts between students and groups of students at risk of falling into trouble, Callender added.

“In the schools we are in high, high, high demand. We have a wait list for preventative programs for about three months.”

London’s unemployment rate for youth aged 15 to 24 hovers around 20%, one of Canada’s highest and more than double the city average, which is also among Canada’s highest for large urban municipalities.

“If we can’t get the kids an education and we can’t get them a job, where else would they go for money?” Callender said.

“If they don’t have food, they’re going to steal it. If they don’t have a house to live in, they’re going to be couch surfing . . . and especially for the young girls, what are they going to get into?”

Even the lower skilled jobs that youths used to get while figuring out what to do with their lives have either been eliminated or filled by the glut of higher educated people who can’t find work, Nash said.

At the same time, young people today are expected to get post-secondary, preferably university, education, Nash noted.

All this is happening when their social and mental development is almost as vulnerable as when they were babies.

“There are all kinds of opportunities for things to go really well and things to not go really well,” Nash said.

The solution doesn’t have to cost more money, but it does require ordinary Londoners to “look beyond their garages” and reach out, Nash said.

“Young people need coaches, mentors, volunteers and role models, people connected to them and making time for them. Good development for young people is about being connected.”

The city does not know how many homeless adults it has and has no specific plan to address street youth and homeless youth, Jan Richardson, manager of homelessness for the city, said.

That’s going to change, she vowed.

The city will begin developing a youth-specific plan on homelessness this fall, and launch an effort to count the number of homeless people next year, Richardson said.

“We believe this (a proper count) will help us in looking at overall practices and solutions to address, reduce and prevent homelessness in general.”

This Week's Flyers

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.